Manuel Elizalde

Manuel Elizalde, protector of minorities, died on May 3rd, aged 60

WHEN Manuel Elizalde announced the discovery of a tribe in the Philippines uncorrupted by civilisation, he touched a sympathetic chord among the ordinary corrupted millions who sometimes allow themselves to muse on the appeal of the simple life. Here, it seemed, was the modern version of Rousseau's noble savage, a people who lived in harmony, had no word for war, and whose modest needs were provided by the rain forest which had sheltered them from contact with the outside world. Their basic food was the wild yam, a root vegetable, flavoured with grubs and small fish, with wild bananas for pudding. Their homes were caves. They made fire by rubbing sticks together. They ran naked in this Eden or dressed in clothes made of leaves.

Immediately, there was scepticism from experts doubtful about any surviving human dodos. How could the Tasaday, as the tribe called itself, have remained undiscovered until 1971 in a country of more than 40m people which was a battleground in the second world war? Mr Elizalde came under deep suspicion. He was from one of the rich families that in the Marcos era ran the Philippines, and, largely, still do. After leaving Harvard he had gained notoriety in Manila newspapers as a playboy. Were the Tasaday people an elaborate hoax?

It would be tidy to close the story there, as one more example of a mischievous anthropological joke, comparable to the Piltdown man, the “missing link” in human development found in 1912 and not exposed as a forgery until 1953. However, the Tasaday discovery is not a Piltdown. Whatever controversy may surround the Tasaday, Mr Elizalde did not invent the tribe.

In the jungle

When Manuel Elizalde first spoke publicly of the Tasaday he had put aside his wild days. He served for a time as president of his family's vast industrial conglomerate—steel, fibres, sugar, mining, broadcasting—and later became head of the government department responsible for minorities in the Philippines. Some years before Mr Elizalde disclosed the whereabouts of the Tasaday he had been told of the tribe by a trader from another tribe in the region.

Mr Elizalde was personally interested in minorities: he and his wife had adopted 50 orphaned children from minority families. He knew from experience of surveying his family's estates that parts of the Philippines were almost inpenetrable. Since 1952 three Japanese soldiers had been holed up in the jungle in the Lubang islands, unaware that the war had ended five years earlier, and shooting at anyone who approached (the last one gave up in 1972). But the Tasaday homeland in Cotabato, in the impoverished deep south of the Philippines, was coming under the eye of the loggers. Mr Elizalde decided to make contact with the tribe and give it protection. “It was us or the lumbermen,” he recalled.

When Mr Elizalde arrived with his party in a helicopter he was treated like a god. An ancestor of the Tasaday had predicted that one day someone “who loves us” would come from the outside world. Mr Elizalde did his godlike best, getting President Marcos to make the jungle inhabited by the tribe a reserve barred to loggers and farmers. The subsequent Aquino and Ramos governments have retained the ban.

Yet doubts remain among some anthropologists about how complete has been the tribe's isolation. A writer in the National Geographic Magazine in 1972 claimed that “as stone age cave dwellers [they] are unique: their like has not been found before in our time.” But later research suggests that the Tasaday may have once lived elsewhere in the Philippines, perhaps as fishermen, but fled into the jungle some hundreds of years ago after clashing with another tribe, or possibly to escape an outbreak of plague. Over a number of generations they then “reverted” to a primitive culture. Neither were they unbelievably peaceable. It turned out that they had knowledge of violence and had bows and arrows. Their “simple life” was a struggle for existence which had reduced their numbers to fewer than a hundred. Anyone seeking a break from civilisation would be better advised to take up something less arduous, like sailing alone around the world or doing up a cottage in Provence.

The publicity given to the Tasaday has overshadowed Mr Elizalde's work protecting other minorities, equally deserving, though less newsy. All over the world there are threatened “unreached peoples”, sought by anthropologists (and enthusiastic Christian missionaries). Mr Elizalde became interested in minorities in Latin America, and moved to Costa Rica in 1983 after falling out with the Marcos regime. He returned to the Philippines in 1988 and was in line to become ambassador to Mexico but withdrew after being attacked for his Marcos links. Most recently, he was educating some members of the Tasaday into the ways of the outside world. At least one Tasaday is learning fast: he is contemplating legal proceedings against an anthropologist who said the tribe was a fake.